On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 18:49 -0700, John Gilmore wrote: > It's a little hard to help without knowing more about the situation. > I.e. is this a software company? Hardware? Music? Movies? > Documents? E-Books?
It's a software company. > Is it trying to prevent access to something, or > the copying of something? What's the something? What's the threat > model? Why is the company trying to do that? Trying to restrain > customers? Its customers would be other software companies that want to produce "monitored" applications. Their product inserts program code into existing applications to make those applications monitor and report their own usage and enforce the terms of their own licenses, for example disabling themselves if the central database indicates that their licensee's subscription has expired or if they've been used for more hours/keystrokes/clicks/users/machines/whatever in the current month than licensed for. The idea is that software developers could use their product instead of spending time and programming effort developing their own license- enforcement mechanisms, using it to directly transform on the executables as the last stage of the build process. The threat model is that the users and sysadmins of the machines where the "monitored" applications are running have a financial motive to prevent those applications from reporting their usage. > What country or countries does the company > operate in? What jurisdictions hold its main customer bases? They are in the US. Their potential customers are international. And their customers' potential clients (the end users of the "monitored" applications) are of course everywhere. > Why should we bother? Isn't it a great idea for DRM fanatics to > throw away their money? More, more, please! Bankrupt yourselves > and drive your customers away. Please! You're taking a very polarized view. These aren't "DRM fanatics"; they're business people doing due diligence on a new project, and likely never to produce any DRM stuff at all if I can successfully convince them that they are unlikely to profit from it. Bear --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majord...@metzdowd.com